Louis B. Mayer — producer with roots in the Russian Empire
Louis B. Mayer was a Belarusian-born American film producer who co-founded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1924 and built it into Hollywood's most glamorous and powerful studio — The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Ben-Hur, Singin' in the Rain. For years the highest-paid executive in the United States.
Tracing the roots — Minsk (Belarus)
Born Lazar Meir in Minsk (Russian Empire, now Belarus) in 1884, Mayer emigrated to Canada and then the United States as a child. His rise from Minsk poverty to the peak of Hollywood power — creating the star system, the studio contract, the idea of MGM as a family — is one of the great immigrant American stories. He never forgot where he came from, even as he reinvented himself as the guardian of American values.
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Minsk (Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.